023 Cleaning, Spam Poetry and Shoemaking

...icle on the laborers who moderate social media comments. Earth Skills Shoe making classes offered by laughingcrowe.com Sewing classes at Sew L.A. We’ll add a link for Randy’s website when he finishes it–in the meantime, if you’re within striking distance of Santa Barbara and are interested in shoe making lessons, go ahead and shoot us an email at rootsimple at gmail dot com and we’ll hook you up with Randy. If you want to leave a question for the...

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Josey Baker’s Awesome Adventure Bread (gluten free!)

...’s foolproof. If you have bread baking anxieties, just leave those behind. Making this “bread” is easier than making cookies. In texture, Adventure Bread could belong to that camp of dense Nordic/Germanic breads, like Vollkornbrot, but its nutty nature sets it apart. The only thing I don’t love about it is the pumpkin seeds–I don’t like their slippery texture so much in this context. Next time I may switch those out. I’m going camping this weekend...

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Mallow (Malva parviflora) an Edible Friend

...into a green sauce and use the leaves as a substitute for grape leaves for making dolmas. Modern Mexicans also make a green sauce with the leaves. If any of you readers have recipes, please send them along. If that ain’t enough, the mucilaginous nature of the plant can be exploited by making a decoction of the leaves and roots to use as a shampoo, hair softener, and treatment for dandruff. And yet, like so many other gardening books, the oh-so-bou...

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Dome Building

...t, stand and lay down–for the most part all 90º activities. Our square and vertical beds, chairs and tables reflect this reality. Square people with their square furniture tend not to fit well in the round shape of your typical hippie dome. This is not to mention all those complex angles involved in building the damn things, and the fact that all of these intersecting angles will someday leak. And we can’t also forget the embarrassing possibilitie...

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McDonald’s Corporation Headquarters Used to Have a Suede Waterbed Think Tank

...heory,” says Mr. Watterson, “the tank is so totally different—there are no vertical or solid horizontal reference points, for instance—you, will be unconsciously encouraged to think differently. It’s instinctive to resist change, but the tank almost forces you into a change configuration.” In this same article we learn that Silicon Valley’s silly office culture isn’t new, Instead of a desk, each employee has a “task response module, a combination...

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